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Remembering Kitty Genovese

On March 13th, 1964, one of one of the most infamous crimes in American history occurred in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, New York. At around 3 AM, 28-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese was attacked, sexually assaulted, and murdered as she walked from her parked car. The assault lasted thirty-five minutes and occurred outside of an apartment building where a reported 38 witnesses either heard or saw the attack and did nothing to stop it. A front-page article in the New York Times sparked an avalanche of press and weeks of national soul searching. The case has lived on in plays, musicals, TV dramas — it even spawned a whole new branch of psychology.

Today the name Kitty Genovese remains synonymous with public apathy, although almost nothing is known of who she actually was. It was not reported in 1964 that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian and that she shared her home in Kew Gardens with her girlfriend, Mary Ann Zielonko. In this piece, the first broadcast interview she has ever granted, Mary Ann remembers Kitty and the time they shared.

Recorded in West Rutland, Vermont. Premiered March 13, 2004, on Weekend Edition Saturday.

This documentary comes from Sound Portraits Productions, a mission-driven independent production company that was created by Dave Isay in 1994. Sound Portraits was the predecessor to StoryCorps and was dedicated to telling stories that brought neglected American voices to a national audience.

Credits

Producers

Transcript

MARY ANN ZIELONKO:

Kitty was the most wonderful person I’ve ever met. I still remember her face. I can see it in my mind: very Italian looking, very chiseled features, dark hair, like only about five feet tall. And very likeable person, very vibrant, where I’m very quiet, so we were complimentary.

I think we met in a bar downtown, and she says, ”Well, I’d like to see you again.” So I says, ”Well, I don’t have a phone.” I lived in a rooming house. I came home that night from work, and I found the note on the rooming house door. She found where I lived, and called me at the pay phone that night. So we were together for a year after that. One year. One year exactly, to the day.

Being a gay woman in that society was very hard, so we were in the closet a lot. In fact, her family didn’t know. I mean, they know now, but there was denial there. It was very hard then.

I remember I went bowling with a friend of ours and I came home. I was tired that night. It was probably 11:30. I went to bed. And the next thing I remember is the police knocking on the door at 4 o’clock in the morning. So they took me to the emergency room, said, ”You have to identify her.” So I did — standard identifying a person with the white sheet. And I went outside and sat on the bench. They said, We’re going to take you home, and I said, ”I’m going to wait for her.”

Sorry, I’m going to start crying here, but this gets rough…

So I just went home and I started drinking, because I couldn’t deal with this. And I drank for about six months, and I realized this is — what am I doing with my life? So I stopped drinking. I got an apartment, and I went back to school. So, I mean, I know about loss.

I still have a lot of anger toward people because they could have saved her life. I mean, all those steps along the way when he attacked her three times. And then he sexually assaulted her too, when she was dying. I mean, you look out the window and you see this happening and you don’t help. That’s — how do you live with yourself, knowing you didn’t do anything? That’s the biggest lesson to be learned from this: really love each other. We have to on this planet.